Quote

Standards are always out of date. That's what makes them standards.

Alan Bennett

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Alan Bennett
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: May 9
Actor
Comedian
Diarist
Film Director
Playwright
Screenwriter
Stage Actor
Writer
Date
Standards
Computer
Makes
Always

More quotes by Alan Bennett

Image
So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.
Alan Bennett
Image
Have you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date? Of course they're out of date. Standards are always out of date. That is what makes them standards.
Alan Bennett
Image
I'm all in favour of free expression provided it's kept rigidly under control.
Alan Bennett
Image
I'm not happy but I'm not unhappy about it.
Alan Bennett
Image
I don't talk very well. With writing, you've time to get it right. Also I've found the more I talk the less I write, and if I didn't write no one would want me to talk anyway.
Alan Bennett
Image
I was an only child. I lost both my parents. By the time I was twenty I was bald. I'm homosexual. In the way of circumstances and background to transcend I had everything an artist could possibly want. It was practically a blueprint.
Alan Bennett
Image
Clichés can be quite fun. That's how they got to be clichés.
Alan Bennett
Image
I've never forgotten that experience. But I had nobody at school that was either like Hector or Irwin. The masters had no idea what was expected of you in the scholarship exam, so you just had to busk it really.
Alan Bennett
Image
Art comes out of art it begins with imitation, often in the form of parody, and it's in the process of imitating the voice of others that one comes to learn the sound of one's own.
Alan Bennett
Image
My films are about embarrassment.
Alan Bennett
Image
If you find yourself born in Barnsley and then set your sights on being Virginia Woolf it is not going to be roses all the way.
Alan Bennett
Image
Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.
Alan Bennett
Image
One of the hardest things for boys to learn is that a teacher is human. One of the hardest things for a teacher to learn is not to try and tell them.
Alan Bennett
Image
Those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories, knowing as their own dusk falls that they will only be remembered for remembering someone else.
Alan Bennett
Image
Nature played a cruel trick on her by giving her a waxed mustache.
Alan Bennett
Image
But then books, as I'm sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action. Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already. You go to a book to have your convictions corroborated. A book, as it were, closes the book.
Alan Bennett
Image
A bookshelf is as particular to its owner as are his or her clothes a personality is stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped by the foot.
Alan Bennett
Image
My films are about embarrassment.
Alan Bennett
Image
There are more microbes per person than the entire population of the world. Imagine that. Per person. This means that if the time scale is diminished in proportion to that of space it would be quite possible for the whole story of Greece and Rome to be played out between farts.
Alan Bennett
Image
Philip Larkin used to cheer himself up by looking in the mirror and saying the line from Rebecca, 'I am Mrs de Winter now!
Alan Bennett